From a collector viewpoint (not necessarily a legal view), I know of at least one U.S. Patents for a fishing reels earlier than that. The first one I am aware of is U.S. Patent 854, July 26, 1838, shown here.
I started doing patent research in the late 1980's when I had a contract from a Kodak subsidiary with Fairfax Hospital in Fairfax, Va to digitize their medical records. Flying in and out of Washington National, I had lots of time to visit the Crystal City U.S. Patent Office, directly adjacent to the airport, and a good place to kill time waiting for planes. I used to go into the rows and rows of patents, arranged by category, and just hunt sequentially through all the folders. Every patent at that time that was older was still in paper form, the original documents in paper folders. More recent patents were on microfilm, and even more recent patents were just beginning to be scanned to digital formats. I spent several years learning where the fishing tackle patents were, and how they were organized. I also came to understand that the Patent Office really didn't have history at the top of their list. Most of the Patent Models that were submitted early are gone, and only a few still exist in the Smithsonian or in the Patent Archives.
When the U.S. Patent office started scanning all their patents and making them available online, I wrote a web crawler to download all the patent categories that I had collected from my patent research. I organized all the downloaded patents into 3 DVDs (DVDs hold 5 GB each, and CDs will not hold enough for but the smallest category). I sold those at shows for several years, until they became widely available from Google. You see, Google also had the magic index of names, which I did not ever finish on my disks. It is just too much work.
My Fishing Tackle DVD Collection consists of 3 disks, Lures, Misc Tackle, and Reels. They are organized into the same categories (folders) that the U.S. Patent Office uses. They are sequential from oldest to newest within those categories. Each Disk has an index of the sequential patents to tell you what category they are in. But the weakness of these disks is that they are not indexed by name.
I still occasionally sell these for $25 each or all three for $60 + Shipping, but with Google and other sources, only the most zealous researcher is interested. The thing is, having a physical disk you can just search each page like you are there cannot be replaced online. Also knowing all the categories that the patent office used is very valuable, and that information is fully explained on each disk.
I am willing to donate this to the club library if they are interested and think it is of value. A great project would be to actually produce an index of every reel patent (or other fishing tackle patents if someone was really ambitious). I have seen many partial indexes, but never a complete one.
Why are the digests and other indexes not complete? Primarily because the U.S. Patent Office went through so many early changes and disasters (like fire) and they were really concerned mostly with the commercial aspect (as I suppose they should have been) and not the historical aspects. Also, the patent category system underwent changes and it is fairly complex. There is no one patent category for Fishing Reels for example. I include all of these patent categories within my Fishing Reel Patent Disk:
CCL43-20-1-327 Rods with reels
CCL43-21$-1-897 Motor operated reels, Holders, supports, steadying devices
CCL43-27$-1-217 Trolley apparatus, line handling means, trawls
CCL242-2$-1-1000 Fishing Reels
CCL242-2$-1001-2000 Fishing Reels
CCL242-2$-2001-3010 Fishing Reels
CCL242-30$-1-605 Fishing Reels
CCL242-31$-1-863 Fishing Reels
CCL242-32$-1-1000 Fishing Reels
CCL242-32$-1001-1482Fishing Reels
Here is a challenge for anyone that is a patent researcher. Find the Tiffany patent on Google. In the meantime, if there is interest in furthering this, let me know.
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